How to Make a Beat in FL Studio

FL Studio, formerly known as FruityLoops, is a digital audio workstation (DAW) developed by the Belgian company Image-Line. It's a powerful software tool used for composing, arranging, recording, editing, mixing, and mastering music. it allows users to create music easily, anywhere in the world. All types of genres and artists have used this program to create culture changing music and trends. Producers from all genres can use FL Studio, but today we're going to be focusing on a futurisitc style Hip-Hop production

In this tutorial we will go over these concepts...

1. The Playlist

FL Studio Main Page.

Before we get into making a masterpiece, you first must understand the basics of what we're looking at here. What you're looking at above is the playlist for the beat that's playing now. The Playlist is where you arrange your music. It's a multi-track space where you can place and organize the patterns you created in the Channel Rack, audio clips, and automation clips to structure your song.

Let's create a pattern by hitting the plus button next to the timecode on the top of the screen. This will create a loop that you can open in the piano roll to actually produce sound.

2. The Piano Roll

Piano Roll With Chords Piano Roll With Bell Piano Roll With Bass

The piano roll is used for creating and editing melodies and chords. It displays notes graphically, allowing you to change their length, pitch, velocity, and other properties.


In this instance, the purple blocks you see are the chords and notes that are playing in the song you can hear now. You can adjust their velocity or how hard or soft each note plays with the "sitcks" below them. The notes on the piano roll can either be drawn in by your mouse or played on a MIDI instrument that you plug into your device and connect to a virtual instruemnt.

3. VSTs

Anaglog Lab VST Serum VST

VST's (Virtual Studio Technology) are synthesizers that integrate audio editors and recording systems to produce basically any sound you'd like to come up with. The two VST's that were used in this beat are called Analog Lab V and Serum. Both of these VSTs have great presets that users can use to get their first ideas out, but both softwares encourage going in and actually editing the sounds yourself by changing wave types, different filters, adding distortion, etc. Sound design is a topic I can dive deep int, but for now I'm just going to explain this simple bass noise made in serum. I started off by using oscilator A to make a sawtooth wave (top left of serum). This is a common wave form for bass samples. I upped the attack speed to add a bit of a ramping sliding effect, a sub that's taken down 2 octaves to really deepen the sound, and a filter effect that cuts out the high end of the sound. These words might not mean much to you if you aren;t familair with sound design, so I'll explain the last part, cutting out the high end. A very common way to do that is to use an EQ. To find that we have to go to the channel rack.

4. Channel Rack

Channel Rack.